I want to read the columns in a file where the separator is :
.
I tried it like this (because according to http://www.asciitable.com, the octal representation of the colon is 072):
$ echo "a:b:c" | perl -a -072 -ne 'print "$F[1]\n";'
I want it to print b
, but it doesn't work.
Look at -F
in perlrun:
% echo "a:b:c" | perl -a -F: -ne 'print "$F[1]\n";'
b
Note that the value is taken as regular expression, so some delimiters may need some extra escaping:
% echo "a.b.c" | perl -a -F. -ne 'print "$F[1]\n";'
% echo "a.b.c" | perl -a -F\\. -ne 'print "$F[1]\n";'
b